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A ghost travels the world, just like the Black Death traveled Europe in the fourteenth century. We are not talking so much about the deadliest plague known to humanity, which ended the lives of 75 million people (between 30 and 50% of the European population), but rather about the disinformation virus, against which there is no soap or disinfectant that is worth. The rumors, hoaxes and interested inventions are now spread by WhatsApp groups and social networks in the same way that between 1347 and 1350 astrology, superstition and divine punishments were used to explain the reasons for the Black Death.

From the records and testimonies that are preserved from that time, the bubonic plague originated in the great steppes controlled by the Mongol hordes with two indispensable allies for its spread: rats and fleas . The Silk Road and other pilgrimage routes through the Middle East were the main transmission path, until the plague entered Europe through the commercial routes of Italy.

How to explain the dead, the dark spots on the skin and the amazing speed of contagion? Looking for a scapegoat to blame, in this case the Jews, who were accused of poisoning wells, doors and windows to end Christianity. Thus began the first pogroms in Germany, Switzerland, and the Crown of Aragon, which did not stop even when Pope Clement VI issued a papal bull to exonerate the Jews.

Almost seven centuries later, we seem bent on stumbling over the same stone carried by this climate of collective hysteria that permeates everything. The most absurd theories about the coronavirus range from bacteriological weapons to its possible link with 5G networks, or take the form of xenophobia and racist attacks against Chinese, Italians and also Spanish.

As Albert Camus pointed out in The Plague , "the evil that exists in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good will without clairvoyance can cause as many disasters as evil." Or, more succinctly, "stupidity always insists".

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